


fire escape

by orphan_account



Category: One Direction (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, M/M, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-01
Updated: 2014-04-01
Packaged: 2018-01-17 18:28:33
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,565
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1398082
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In all honesty it's always bothered Zayn when people try to tell them they have their entire future planned out. It annoys him because all he can do is sit there and listen to them, nodding along because it'd be rude to say what's truly on his mind.</p>
            </blockquote>





	fire escape

**Author's Note:**

> title from Fire Escape by Foster the People
> 
> & if you see the name Louis in there anywhere, ignore it because this was originally a zouis fic but I've changed it to suit ziall.

i.

Niall lies awake on a dingey, blanket clad box spring. His eyes are trained on the ceiling, observing the various unknown stains littering the popcorn style. He can't remember what he told himself he'd do, but he's sure if he remembered something for once in his life, he would be doing just that right now.

His room is freezing, and only when a light breeze hits his face does he realize the window is still open. Maybe he was going to close the window before he got distracted, but he doesn't think much of it, instead pulling himself up into a lazy stance and padding over to the window.

There's a young man hunched over on the fire escape, puffing smoke from a joint of some kind. Niall notices him just as he gets his hands on the window and just stares at him with stationary fingers until he's noticed himself. The man laughs briskly and pats the spot next to him on the stairwell, moving a potted succulent plant to the side soon after.

"Smoking on the _fire escape_?" Niall asks, climbing over the windowsill and taking a seat one step down from the man, Zayn. "How ironic." He adds softly, reaching out for the joint. Zayn's hand meets his halfway, passing the joint to him as he exhales a cloud of smoke from his teeth bitten lips.

Zayn shrugs shamelessly and the air around them goes thin. The only sounds they hear now are the tell tale tokes and the cars driving through the streets below. From where they are they don't have a very nice view, only being able to see a sliver of the skyline before it's interrupted by the neighboring apartment building. Zayn always sighs when Niall mentions it, carding his fingers through overgrown hair and muttering that it's lovely, and it'd only lose it's beauty if Niall wasn't there to see the sunrise with him - to which Niall smacks him on the back of the head and calls him a sap.

Niall passes the joint back up to him, his eyes crossing as he attempts to catch the unfurling of smoke from his lips, which only draws a laugh from both him and Zayn. "I want to go for a walk," The latter says, his eyes flicking up to meet those of the boy below him. 

"That sounds lovely, hope you have fun. I have to go to work though." 

Zayn juts his lower lip out in a pout, drawing his brows in together. "Screw work. Fuck the free world."

Niall chuckles, rolling his eyes. "We'll be evicted with that attitude," He supplies and stands up, leaning up on his tiptoes to provide Zayn with a loving kiss to the forehead. With not so much as another word he climbs back into the flat, stopping once he's on the other side to duck his head back out. "Make sure to close the window once you're back in, yeah?"

The boy sitting on the stairwell flips him off blindly -playfully of course and Niall just laughs.

 

ii.

 

There's something indignant about life when you are stuck in one place for too long. It's blatant and it will nag at you until you feed it. Zayn knows this feeling all too well, but has gotten far too good at ignoring it to do something indecent like run off without reason.

He wakes up too early for his own liking, and has a hard enough time looking at his face for too long in the water speckled bathroom mirror. There's something different about him and he can't tell if he likes it or not. He thinks it's that he feels stable, like Niall is his rock and has kept him in one place for way longer than he's ever been.

Zayn stares at his index finger and thumb when he writes. His name flows out easily onto the page as he prints and then signs his name, groaning once it's done when he's realized his left hand had smudged the entire thing. "Fucking hell," He mumbles, praising himself for using a pencil instead of a pen. He can't pinpoint when he's started feeling this way about being in one place for a stretched amount of time, just like he can't pinpoint when he started to smoke recreationally or write like his mother does.

The letter looks fine. Despite the scribbly signature at the bottom. It's just a piece of paper, right? Just an application for his dream school that he'd typed up and printed off weeks ago, keeping quiet about it so Niall wouldn't try to corrupt his mind even though the only corrupting would be him telling him he should enroll.

The preamble is a little suspicious and honestly it makes him nervous the more he looks at it. But he reassures himself it's in his own words and if anything they won't think twice, then folds the letter up and tucks it in an envelope, then in the back corner of his two-drawer filing cabinet. 

Zayn exhales like he'd just deadlifted a schoolbus, suddenly overwhelmed by the very thought of doing something serious for himself. It'd always been about everyone else, hadn't it. He wasn't even mad about that, he just.. he.. he needed another cigarette.

 

iii.

 

When Niall comes home that night with his pullover draped over his forearm, he's greeted with the pungent smell of onions and the blaring of Awolnation's  _Sail_ on the stereo. He raises his eyebrows curiously and tosses his sweater off to the side, not giving much care to where it ends up as long as it doesn't interfere with anything later on. Zayn's in the small kitchen, chopping up onions and adding them to a pot sat on a burner on the stove. 

"Honey I'm home." Niall says with a slight lilt to his tone, circling the counter to stand near Zayn. He wraps his arms around his slender midsection and hums at the warmth and familiar musk radiating from him. Zayn grins crookedly and sets the knife down, pivoting around to face the significantly shorter boy.

Said boy can barely take a breath before he's being lifted onto the countertop, an array of kisses peppered along his jaw and down his neck. "What's gotten into you?" But Zayn just continues, his hands never leaving their spots on the counter on either side of Niall. "D'ya want to take a trip?"

Niall pulls his head back, holding Zayn's in his hands with a concerned gaze. "What's this now?"

"A trip. Just you and me," Zayn replies and buries his face into the crook of Niall's neck. "Anywhere in the world, just name the place." 

" _Zee_ , no."

Zayn looks up at him through his eyelashes, his eyebrows raised to match Niall's, although his are more on the comic side. "It's a really bad time, love."

He groans pathetically. "Ni-,"

"Don't."

Niall wriggles out of his grasp and hops off the counter, pushing the bodice of his shirt up his waist while he walks towards the bedroom area of the flat. Zayn can see him and doesn't stop watching him with the same maimed elk expression. He stalks over to the bed and flops down on the mattress, thankful that he'd chosen to put it back atop the box spring after their short phase of wanting a "bigger" bed. Basically, they'd just moved the mattress on the floor beside the bed frame so they had their own side. Yeah.

The radio was now playing _Creep_ by Radiohead, the lyrics clearer now since they were closer to the stereo. Niall joined him on the bed, clad in a pair of plaid boxers only. "A trip sounds lovely," He sits crosslegged. "But it's impractical because it's almost April and we're fucking broke."

Zayn coos after that, reaching up from his side-lay position to muss up Niall's hair, turning brown at the roots. "Well then, let's move."

"What?"

He nods. "Let's move. We'll rent the place or whatever, you quit your job and we'll just.. go." But he doesn't smile, knowing from past experience and from various 80's movies that if you smile after you offer something major, no one's gonna take you serious.

Niall purses his lips, his eyes studying Zayn's face for any sign of insincerity. Then he nodded slowly which surprised Zayn to say the least. "Okay,"

Zayn smiles, still unsure. "Okay?" And Niall rolls his eyes, muttering something along the lines of 'don't make me change my mind' or 'don't make me regret this'. He lowers himself down to lay next to Zayn, resting his palm flat on the side of his face. "what were you chopping onions for exactly?" 

"I was gonna make you something to eat," He narrows his eyes. "But then I remembered I didn't know how to cook so I turned off the stove and got out the onions."

Niall laughs like liquid caramel, slow and sweet - it echoes throughout the apartment and would probably scare a flock of birds if there were any nearby. But it's a beautiful laugh. He rolls around so he's straddling Zayn's hips, half-bare thighs bracketing the waist below him. "And what did you plan to do with those?" He asks, slipping his hand just under the hem of Zayn's shirt. 

The boy laying on the mattress below him trailed a gentle hand up the expanse of his thigh, his eyes trained on the fair skin ahead of him. "Onion rings," And Niall just chuckles again and drops his head to join their lips. The radio station continues playing songs both boys know ninety percent of the lyrics too, the music drifts through the room and maybe even out the window leading to the fire escape because God knows Zayn never closes it. Songs pass and various unnecessary clothing articles are removed, tossed to some odd corner like everything else.

Halfway through a Pink Floyd song Niall moves himself over to lay next to Zayn, using the hand that isn't now underneath his pillow to cover his body with the quilt. He falls asleep after uttering a mantra of  _i love you_ 's in Zayn's general direction, his eyes closed completely and overtaken by the urge to sleep. 

Zayn watches him for a little while, then slips out of bed - grabbing a pair of stray boxers and pulling them on, scouting the room for a book or atleast something to distract him.

Ten minutes finds him sitting just outside the window, keeping his elbow propped up on the windowsill to prevent being locked out even accidentally. He reads but can't focus on the dialogue.

 

iv.

 

The next morning Niall types up a letter to inform his boss that he was quitting, only after going over with Zayn that he felt it was only right to give his boss the two week notice. Zayn nodded and smiled and kissed the top of his head, grabbing his coat and set of keys before heading out somewhere.

Him and Zayn sat together in a park the next Friday in silence, or until Niall laughed curtly and started rambling worriedly. "When you said we would move, what did you mean?" He turned his head to look at Zayn, able to see half of him only really.

"Don't really know to be honest." Zayn squinted against the harsh sunlight, lifting a hand to shade his eyes. "It was more like a spur of the moment thing. Like when you get really excited over something and then realize you don't have the funds to do it."

Niall groaned, whacking his forehead against the bony shoulder beside him, and Zayn was fucking shocked that he didn't have a concussion from how hard he smacked his head. "We're driving a U-Haul truck for fucks sake, Zayn." He gestures wildly to the parking lot in the distance which is half full of small family cars, then a medium sized moving truck. "Our house is literally in the trunk, and we don't have-" Zayn cut him off, pressing his lips to his harshly, then pulled away hoping that would shut him up.

It didn't.

"Our new flat is like.. on the other side of the fucking universe-"

" _In the next town,_ " Zayn corrected, eyeing him.

"-whatever, it's in a place we've never even heard of until now. Pretty sure it's a paper town or some shit." Niall pulls his knees up to his chest, resting his chin atop his kneecaps. There's a long pause that Zayn uses to think of plausible reasons to explain why this was probably a bad idea but  _will_ turn out good, but it's cut short. "But I mean, that was the point wasn't it." He glances up at Zayn and smiles kindly.

 

v.

 

Zayn blinks his amber eyes open, met with the sight (despite the near blinding sunlight) of an angelic boy sitting on the fire escape outside the window. It almost feels odd to not feel the floor when he sits up and swings his legs over the side of the bed, but all in all he's thankful that his career has granted him the ability to buy a proper bed for him and Niall. The floor bed was nice, but Zayn thinks he would miss teasing Niall about struggling nightly to get onto the mattress more than he would miss sleeping so close to the floor.

He wanders through the sunlit apartment, pausing before he goes to climb out the window. Niall must see him or hear him, because he removes one of his earbuds and beams, beckoning Zayn to join him. The latter happily obliges.

Niall taps at the end of his cigarette, disposing of the ash that falls off in the porcelain ash tray that Zayn created and brought home from the art class he teaches. (at the university when he's not in well.. class) Zayn lifts an eyebrow and scoffs. "Smoking on the _fire escape_?" He exclaims, mocking Niall's tone from all that time ago when this scenario occurred. Niall saved him the effort of continuing, rolling his cerulean blue eyes with a sweet laugh. "How ironic, I know."

"Do you regret anything?" Zayn asks quietly, running his tongue along his his lower lip to moisten the dry skin. He reaches for Niall's pack of cigarettes to read off the back, knowing better than to take one for himself. The smoke that floats through the air would have something so mystical about it if it didn't have such a poisonous backstory, but Zayn watches it anyways - his eyes blinking slowly. He hands the box back to the blonde.

Niall puts out his cigarette, though it wasn't even half done. He tosses the pack into the soil of a potted plant and stretches his arms out infront of him, yawning.

Neither of them say a word which is more or less a signal that they either ignored the question or they're thinking. Niall rests his head on Zayn's shoulder and sighs contently. "Yeah, but that's what makes the future good. You can just think, it happened and it's done.. and then you can move on and do things you'll be proud of." 

He's content to not be able to argue with that.

 

vi.

 

_"I am a fire escape. Spine is made of iron, but my heart pumps that old red paint. Save yourself, save yourself."_

 


End file.
